Holidays, Festivals and Customs – Part Two
In part one of holidays and festivals I concentrated on official holidays, i.e. Bank Holidays. In part two I am going to look at other festivals and customs that we celebrate during the year and the reason why we do so.

On the 14th February, we celebrate St. Valentine’s Day. St. Valentine was a Roman Christian priest who was martyred during the reign of the Emperor Claudius II. The traditional celebration apparently arose from a Roman pagan festival. Today we send Valentine cards, anonymously, to those we romantically desire.

Shrove Tuesday, also known by its French name, Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) is the next festival that we celebrate. We cook pancakes on Shrove Tuesday to use up flour, fat and eggs before the beginning of Lent, a season of prayer, abstinence and fasting observed in memory of the forty days fast of Christ in the desert.

The first day of Lent is Ash Wednesday, which gets its name from the practice, mainly in the Roman Catholic Church, of putting ashes on the foreheads of the faithful to remind them that ‘man is but dust’.

The first patron saint’s day celebrated in Great Britain is St. David’s Day. St. David is the patron saint of Wales and his feast day is celebrated on March 1st. St. David lived in the 6th century and was probably born in Cardiganshire. He was primate of South Wales and he founded numerous churches, including the cathedral at St. David’s, Britain’s smallest city. Bones in a casket behind the High Altar in St. David’s Cathedral are believed to be his. The emblem of Wales is the leek, arising from an occasion when a troop of Welsh were able to distinguish each other from a troop of the English enemy dressed in similar fashion. The Welsh wear the emblem of Wales on the 1st March in honour of their patron saint. An alternative is the daffodil, developed in recent years by the English government, as it lacks the overtones of patriotic defiance associated with the leek.

Commonwealth Day is celebrated on March 12th in the United Kingdom and on various dates throughout the rest of the Commonwealth. It was originally known as Empire Day, and was celebrated on 24th May, Queen Victoria’s birthday. The celebration of Empire Day was of great significance. The ritual celebration traversed boundaries and helped sustain traditional social hierarchies. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Empire Day retained its potency by amalgamating the emerging traditions of sombre commemoration into the repertoire of Imperial festivity and continued to be popular during the interwar period. However, with India’s Independence in 1947, the Empire was approaching the end of the road and it gave way to the noble concept of a Commonwealth of free peoples. Empire Day became Commonwealth Day in 1959 and the date was then altered.

The second saint’s day celebrated is St. Patrick’s Day, on the 17th March. A Christian missionary, Patrick is credited with converting the Irish from Paganism to Christianity and is known as the Apostle of Ireland. “You tell us that there are three Gods and yet one”, the puzzled Irish said when St. Patrick was preaching the gospel to them in the 5th century, “How can that be?” The Saint bent down and plucked a shamrock. “Do you not see,” he said, “how in this wild flower three leaves are united on one stalk, and will you not then believe that there are indeed three persons and yet one God?” Thus according to Irish legend, Ireland’s patron saint chose the shamrock as a symbol of the Trinity of the Christian church. To this day the shamrock remains the national emblem of Ireland and is worn proudly by Irish people the world over on St. Patrick’s Day.

Mothering Sunday is held on the third Sunday in March to celebrate the work and skill of a mother raising children. Girls in service were given the whole day off, a very unusual occurrence; to take their mother’s a gift. The first mothering Sunday was observed in Philadelphia in 1907 and has been observed nationally since 1914.

Palm Sunday is celebrated one week before Easter in the Christian church and commemorates the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It is so called because the crowds threw Palm fronds, the symbol of triumph, onto the ground to cushion his ride. Branches of the Yew tree, instead of Palm, are borne in Palm Sunday processions in Britain, as in early times it was probably the only evergreen tree. The Yew, associated with churchyards, is the symbol of everlasting life, due to the unique way the branches grow down into the ground to form new stems. Holy week begins on Palm Sunday.

The 1st April is April Fools Day, a traditional day for playing pranks on unsuspecting people. The origin of this day is uncertain, but may be related to the arrival of spring in late March, when nature is said to ‘fool’ humanity with changes in the weather. Another explanation has to do with the change to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which moved New Years Day to the 1st January. Those who were unaware of the change, or were too conservative to break with tradition would celebrate the last day of the old 8-day New Years festival on the 1st April and so were known as April fools.

Maundy Thursday is the day before Good Friday and is also known as Holy Thursday. Celebrated by the Christian church it is held in memory of the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples, after which, he washed the feet of the apostles and gave them a new commandment ‘love one another’. Maundy is derived from the Latin ‘Mandatum’ meaning commandment. In Britain, the tradition of giving silver coins and washing the feet of the poor is said to have originated with St. Augustine in 597AD in Canterbury and has been performed by the monarch since the days of Edward II. However, Charles II did not wash the feet of the poor but got the Bishop of London to do it for him. The last monarch to have performed this act was James II. Today, the monarch attends a service at one of the many cathedrals in rotation and distributes Maundy money to male and female pensioners from the local community. The amount of money and the number of pensioners is equal to the age of the monarch. Maundy money sets consist of four coins, one penny, two pence, three pence and four pence.

The third patron saint’s day celebrated in the year is St. George, on the 23rd April. Because of his association with chivalric legends during the Middle Ages, St. George became very popular and was made the Patron Saint of soldiers and was adopted as patron saint of England, Aaragon and Portugal. According to legend, there once lived, in a distant, pagan land, a dreadful monster called a dragon. The flapping of its great bat like wings could be heard miles around. With a single blow of its terrible claws it could fell an ox. From its nostrils came clouds of smoke and flame. Every year a young girl was offered to it to prevent it from destroying all inhabitants. St. George was the youngest and bravest of the seven champions of Christendom. With his magic sword, Ascalon, he slew the dragon. Won over to the Christian faith by this deed of its champion, the people were baptised. George was actually a Saint of the Eastern Church who may have been martyred in Palestine around AD 250 or during the great persecutions by the Roman Emperor, Diocletian, on April 23rd AD 303.

To be continued…

1 Comment »